


Secret Secrets

by shauds



Series: The Penpal Verse [3]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, Shadowpact (Comics), countdown to final crisis - Fandom
Genre: F/M, Four plus One, Gen, Jason doesn't want anyone to know he's alive, Secrets, but he knows they know, but he's not as good at hiding things as he thinks he is, no editing we die like our dearly beloved jason todd, so I didn't add them in this, the rest of his team also know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:01:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24866485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shauds/pseuds/shauds
Summary: Jason told Eddie he was alive early because Eddie was the only person he trusted to keep it a secret. Turned out there were other people willing to keep it a secret, even if they're not telling him thatOr: One person Jason told he was alive, and four more who figured it out on their own but kept it to themselves.
Relationships: Eddie Bloomberg & Jason Todd, Jaime Reyes and Eddie Bloomberg, Jason Todd & Donna Troy, Jason Todd & Zatanna Zatara, Jason Todd and Detective Chimp, Jason Todd and Jaime Reyes, Zachary Zatara & Zatanna Zatara
Series: The Penpal Verse [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1608658
Comments: 13
Kudos: 67





	Secret Secrets

At the start, Jason never meant for **anyone** to find out he was back until he was good and ready to rip Bruce apart. It was supposed to be a surprise after all, and it wouldn’t have been as much if it got spoiled beforehand.

Eddie was different, he’d always been good for keeping a secret back when they’d been kids, and it seemed time hadn't changed **that** part of him at least. Even when Eddie went and joined a team featuring the kid Bruce had gone and replaced him with – something Jason wasn’t going to dwell on now, there’d be time for that later, whenever later happened to come – Jason hadn’t been worried about his oldest friend spilling anything. He could trust Eddie and it wasn’t fair to make him pay for things Eddie had never taken part of.

Eddie might have been the only person who knew the whole story that Jason would have trusted with the truth. He never would have guessed that anyone else would keep it if they ever found out.

He thought wrong, but not all of those who found out took the time to tell **him** that.

****

**ooo**

Donna ‘met’ Jason at shortly after Duela Dent’s funeral, where Jason and Eddie had gotten into their first in person fight over demons and opportunities, and just petty, stupid things they both regretted as soon as they were brought up. It wasn’t the best of first impressions, but it helped that Jason seemed to have come out of it worse than his friend. 

She didn’t find out who it was she and Kyle were hopping around the Multiverse with until they lost and found him in a world more similar to theirs than any of the others they’d passed through. A world where Bruce Wayne was dead, Dick Grayson was straining under the pressure of being Batman and Jason Todd was alive; alive and if that version of Dick could be believed when he hardly seemed to believed himself, well past the point of reason.

The Jason Donna had brought along didn’t hear any of the conversation that followed, pre-occupied with stashing small sandwiches in his backpack and teaming up with a new blonde Batgirl in needling Kyle into helping them needle a new, smaller Robin. It was childish and innocent, free of any real intent to harm… And it was clear that watching it was breaking Dick’s heart.

That this version of his younger brother who’d kept the very fact that he was alive from them all could be so carefree and happy, while the version who should have been better for having them was neither.

Dick asked, no, it came closer to begging, for Donna to protect that by leaving things as they were, to keep watch over the boy as best she could and keep his secret at least until she could be sure it wasn’t all that kept Jason as he was. As much as she wanted to share what should have been a miracle with everyone who’d missed him, she couldn’t bring herself to say no. 

But after they’d returned to their own world, she watched, and she listened, waiting for any sign that the time might be right to let his family know. She kept the secret well, and from Jason himself, even the fact that she knew it. She did her best to make sure he stayed alive long enough to make sure that time came.

****

**ooo**

Zatanna Zatara found out next only because once he got talking to her, her little cousin didn’t have much of a filter. She thought it was cute, mostly how earnest and chatty he got when he was in the right mood. There really was only so much, gushing – though not to his knowledge – about Eddie and complaining about Jason he could do before he mentioned how Jason knew Eddie when they were kids, and also, oh yeah, Jason was Robin and doesn’t **that** just explain him being so insufferable?

And now, Zatanna cared for Bruce, she really did, him and his children, but she cared for her little cousin more. Cared for him making friends that brought him out of his prickly shell, even when he didn’t always get along with them, that he spoke about them so much was all she needed to see how much **he** cared about **them**. It was just as easy to see that they cared for him in kind. She couldn’t risk taking that from him just for the sake of her own conscience. And Jason was hardly a child himself, there was no magic or mental manipulation of any kind she could find when she covertly looked him over any of the times he joined Zach and their steadily growing group of friends for visits.

His family had done their grieving, and there wasn’t any need for her to break open old wounds and bare whatever reasons there were for Jason hiding from them. In the meantime, she got to see her cousin happy, building **real** friendships with people who would die for him for maybe the first time in his life. She wasn’t risking it.

****

**ooo**

Jaime found out completely by accident, and it happened in two parts. He was just messing around with the Titans’ super computer, because it was a **supercomputer** that was free for the messing with whenever Wendy or Marvin weren’t busy doing their thing. No way Jaime **wasn’t** going to at least try it out.

Somehow it went from playing around with the various satellite programs to seeing how Scarab could interface with it, which went really well. Then, well, spending so much time with people who were **so** secretive – and he got why they were, it was just a little annoying sometimes – he might have sort of, gotten Scarab to tap into the more secretive files. Just to gleam, he promised himself, he’d stop right away if he came across anything too personal.

That was how he found out the name of the second Robin, and also more details on what had happened to him. It was… enough, for him to close out and swear to himself that he was never going to dig around in those sorts of files again.

He didn’t learn his lesson about snooping then, because not a month later, Jaime was using Scarab to scan Eddie’s room looking for the birthday present Eddie had been smugly hinting at, but would not tell Jaime what it was. And Eddie was actually a pretty good gift giver, Jaime held out until a good week before his birthday before he went snooping.

The scan revealed Eddie doing **something** with a box, but wasn’t clear enough for Jaime to tell what it was.

Barging in with a triumphant shout and a point finger, resulted only in Eddie looking at him over a slip of paper and a raised brow. It wasn’t Jaime’s birthday present he was working with, just his box of letters from his penpal on his other team. Jaime left in shame.

Scarab had been running a scan the whole time, and Jaime hadn’t asked him to do that, but since it was already done, Jaime asked if there was anything interesting in the scan, anything that might have been the hiding place of a birthday present. There wasn’t, but Scarab did think it was interesting enough to point out that Eddie’s letters, ones dated not long ago, were signed Jason P. Todd.

The only part of this that Jaime did do on purpose was ageing up with only picture of the second Robin he could find, and then ageing down footage of Eddie’s penpal, and well… This was absolutely **not** something that was any of Jaime’s business, but it **did** explain the increased levels of aggressions Scarab picked up from Eddie every time someone, mostly when those someone’s were bats, brought up the second Robin around him.

And Eddie’s penpal was cool, he brought things when he visited and invited Jaime along to that surprise thing they’d done for **Eddie’s** birthday. Not like this was the weirdest thing he’d learned in his time as a superhero, and also not the biggest secret he’d ever kept, he could keep it to himself.

****

**ooo**

Detective Chimp found out because he was curious and bored and those kids who were suddenly hanging around his team were as interesting as anything else he was going to look into. He didn’t really care that Jason had once been the second Robin, only that he wouldn’t stop swapping out his drinks for non-alcoholic versions. It wasn’t that funny and DC didn’t know what the boy was doing with the all the alcohol he stole, but he had his suspicions that whatever it was, it was flammable.

****

**ooo**

Jason was very careful not to let anyone other than his friends - he'd concede to calling them that, but stayed vehement that they were not a superhero team, stop it Eddie - know who he was.

Nobody who had any chance of telling anyone who could tell could have known because if they did, someone would have been kicking down his door alresdy. He just needed to kill some demons, perfect his plans, and he'd he all ready to go, something big, something so loud they'd all know. 

Untill then, it wasn't like he was in any rush, there was plenty of time to take some breaks, check in on his friends and annoy some people. Nobody was going to find out, he was sure of it.


End file.
